Today’s most effective marketing strategies balance upper-funnel brand metrics with lower-funnel ROAS, ROI, and conversion-focused efforts. This dual approach recognizes that building brand equity and driving immediate performance aren’t competing priorities—they’re complementary strategies that amplify each other’s effectiveness.
Brand lift campaign effectiveness studies are essential tools in this balanced approach.
Here’s why marketers are increasingly investing in measuring consumer perceptions:
- Justifying marketing investments – Connecting ad spend directly to shifts in brand perceptions helps marketers show the value of their media investment (and often their goals are tied to moving key metrics like unaided awareness, consideration, brand trust, etc.)
- Budget optimization – Understanding which creatives, placements, channels, frequencies, etc. move specific brand metrics allows for more strategic media investment.
- Brand building as a foundation – Strong brand metrics (awareness, consideration, preference, etc.) create the conditions for more efficient performance marketing and conversion. (sophisticated marketers will look for ways to connect lifts in brand metrics with downstream conversions/sales/account signups, etc.)
- Long-term business value – While direct response metrics show immediate results, brand metrics indicate the creation of sustainable competitive advantage and pricing power that extends far beyond individual campaigns.
- Full-funnel measurement – The most advanced marketers recognize that focusing solely on lower-funnel metrics creates blind spots. Brand health metrics provide a comprehensive picture of marketing effectiveness. They reveal how different stimuli work together—how combinations of media partners, channels, and creative messaging independently and collectively change consumer perceptions toward a brand and its products or services.
The next step is connecting these brand insights to measurable business outcomes.
Connecting Brand Metrics to Lower-Funnel Outcomes
Data sets are interconnected now more than ever. These connections allow advertisers to link upper funnel/attitudinal data with lower funnel/conversion data in privacy-safe environments for data collaboration and analysis.
These connections are valuable as they enable:
- Attribution beyond last-click – Brand campaigns often influence conversions that are ultimately attributed to performance channels or direct traffic.
- Consideration-to-conversion pipeline – Improvements in brand KPIs typically precede improvements in conversion rates. Tracking this relationship helps predict future performance. As brand initiatives evolve, natural maturation occurs where the focus can shift further down the funnel.
- Customer lifetime value – Brand affinity directly impacts customer retention, repeat purchase rates, and willingness to pay premium prices.
- Efficiency of performance marketing – Strong brand metrics reduce the cost of acquisition in performance channels as consumers require less convincing.
Summary
The most successful marketers don’t treat brand building and performance marketing as separate disciplines. By measuring consumer perceptions alongside conversion metrics—and understanding how they influence each other—marketers can optimize for both immediate results and long-term growth.
Building measurement frameworks that capture both the immediate performance of your campaigns and the gradual shifts in consumer perception creates sustainable competitive advantage. With the variety of tools and interconnections available, putting together the full picture is more tangible and accessible than ever.